Geoffrey Chaucer: Literary Development and Social Context

Geoffrey Chaucer: Civil Servant and Poet

For example, he took part in several diplomatic missions to Spain, France, and Italy. Chaucer was a hardworking civil servant who wrote poetry as a diversion.

Diplomatic Missions and Italian Renaissance Influence

The diplomatic mission that sent Chaucer to Italy was in all likelihood a milestone in his literary development. This visit brought him into direct contact with the Italian Renaissance—Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. These writers provided him with new subject matter and new modes of representation.

Major Literary Works and Sources

Boccaccio provided sources for The Canterbury Tales, and for his longest poem, Troilus and Criseyde, one of the greatest love poems in any language.

The Influence of Boethius and Religious Works

Chaucer also wrote moral and religious works, chiefly translations. He made a prose translation of the Latin Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman statesman Boethius while in prison. The Consolation became a favorite book for the Middle Ages, providing inspiration and comfort through its lesson that worldly fortune is deceitful and ephemeral and through the Platonic doctrine that the body itself is only a prison house for the soul that aspires to eternal things.

Chaucer's Unique Social Position and Complexity

Chaucer's writings were many faceted; they embrace:

• Prose and poetry;
• Human and divine love;
• French and Italian sources;
• Secular and religious influences;
• Comedy and philosophy.

Moreover, different elements are likely to mix in the same work. This Chaucerian complexity owes much to the wide range of Chaucer's learning and his exposure to new literary currents on the Continent, but perhaps also to the special position he occupied as a member of a new class of civil servants.

Born into the urban middle class, he attained the rank of "esquire." His career brought him into contact with bourgeois and aristocratic social worlds, without his being securely anchored in either. He was born a commoner. Situated between two social worlds, belonging to neither, he had the gift of being able to view with both sympathy and humor the behaviors, beliefs, and pretensions of the diverse people who comprised the levels of society. Chaucer was able to be both involved in and detached from a given situation.

Narrative Voice and Literary Shift

We readers find Chaucer directly in his poetry. Few English poets speak more freely in the first person. He speaks so, not only in short poems, but also in every one of his major narrative pieces.

Key Idea: Plot and Literary Transition

One idea to highlight is the shift from the epic of Old English to romance in Middle English.